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[BFEL]

So could someone explain the whole "bashed patch" thing to me?

I mean, I'm pretty sure I get the basic concept (merge mods to make them not overwrite each other and such) but the details are...iffy to me.

[Sordid]

AFAIK it has to do with the randomly generated loot. TES games use something called leveled lists, which are lists of items a container or mob can have. The loot you get from any particular container or mob is randomly selected from this list when that container or mob spawns in the game. Unfortunately it's not possible to pile on modifications upon modifications the way you can do with, say, terrain. You can have a mod that adds a house into the game, and then another mod on top of that that adds furniture into the house, and as long as they're loaded in the correct order it'll be fine. Leveled lists don't work like that, they can only be overwritten, not modified. A mod that 'adds' an item into a leveled list, such as by giving dwemer armor to bandits in addition to their usual low-tier armors, actually replaces that leveled list for bandits with one that's mostly identical but also includes dwemer armor. So if you have a mod that gives dwemer armor to bandits, and then another mod that gives daedric armor to bandits, only the one that's loaded last will actually be active. A bashed patch combines leveled lists from all the mods you have active so that they don't override each other.

To be honest I find it mind-boggling that this is still a thing. Morrowind had the exact same problem and required the same workaround (i.e. the use of a fan-made tool to generate a merged leveled list), and that was more than ten years ago. Oblivion and Skyrim have made absolutely zero improvement in this area.

[Teneb]

To be honest I find it mind-boggling that this is still a thing. Morrowind had the exact same problem and required the same workaround (i.e. the use of a fan-made tool to generate a merged leveled list), and that was more than ten years ago. Oblivion and Skyrim have made absolutely zero improvement in this area.

Probably because Morrowind and Oblivion shared the same engine (GameBryo? Something like that), and Bethesda pretty much mimicked that engine when they made the new one for Skyrim (Because the owners of that engine went bankrupt and the license for it expired)

[Vendayn]

Merging mods made such a massive difference to my game.

What is that noise??!?

Oh I forgot I had a bunch of sound mods...


wait!

THEY ARE WORKING! I wondered why I wasn't getting the new sounds...

What is this? My FPS WENT UP??? WHAT TRICKERY IS THIS!

Hey! what are all these new monsters in my game??? WHY SO MANY PEOPLE ON THE ROAD!

oh...I forgot I had traveller mods to make Skyrim less dead.

Well...all day working on skyrim yesterday sure paid off. I wasn't crashing before, but decided to go through and merge stuff and do a bit of cleaning on some mods that needed it (which wasn't many, since I already did that before).

Wow what a difference did it make.

[Putnam]

To be honest I find it mind-boggling that this is still a thing. Morrowind had the exact same problem and required the same workaround (i.e. the use of a fan-made tool to generate a merged leveled list), and that was more than ten years ago. Oblivion and Skyrim have made absolutely zero improvement in this area.

Probably because Morrowind and Oblivion shared the same engine (GameBryo? Something like that), and Bethesda pretty much mimicked that engine when they made the new one for Skyrim (Because the owners of that engine went bankrupt and the license for it expired)

Creation is actually still just modified GameBryo.

[Sordid]

Well yeah, but there was a lot of improvement done in other areas of the engine. If all else failed, Bethesda could have written their own leveled list merging tool and included it with the game.

I wonder what they'll do for the next game, which I assume is going to run on the new consoles, in terms of engine. If they trot out this same tired old thing again, I'm going to be massively disappointed.

[Ivefan]

If they trot out this same tired old thing again, I'm going to be massively disappointed.

Hey. It works and the community will "fix everything for us(Bethseda)" so of course they will.

[Reverie]

Speaking of the next game, I wonder where it will be central to. Elsweyr?

[ejseto]

To be honest I find it mind-boggling that this is still a thing. Morrowind had the exact same problem and required the same workaround (i.e. the use of a fan-made tool to generate a merged leveled list), and that was more than ten years ago. Oblivion and Skyrim have made absolutely zero improvement in this area.

Pretty sure it's not still a thing. You can use scripting to add items to lists. Obviously scripting is harder than simply editing a list but the capability is there. Don't complain if the tools are there but most modders are simply too amateurish to make use of them. There's no way Bethesda can know if a certain modder intends to overwrite a whole list or just add stuff to it.

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/662256-best-way-to-add-items-to-merchants/

The capability was apparently also in Fallout 3/NV as well:

http://geck.bethsoft.com/index.php?title=AddItemToLeveledList

Heh, has anyone tried reducing the shout recharge time to 0? Rapid fire shouts sounds like a great tool to induce game crashes.

I can't recall it off the top of my head since I haven't played Skyrim in over a year, but there is a VERY simple console command to set the shout cooldown coefficient.

The very first google search result for "skyrim shout cooldown console" has the command.

I think you can also use:
player.modav ShoutRecoveryMult -1

SetAV isn't permanent across savegames, but ModAV is.

[Vendayn]

Speaking of the next game, I wonder where it will be central to. Elsweyr?

Well, so far they have done Morrowind (Dark Elves+Argonians), Cyrodiil (Imperials) and Skyrim (Nords)...my guess is actually either Elsweyr (Khajiits+Thalmor) or one of the Elven provinces. I am almost certain not Summerset Isles, that would move the story to quick...but never know I guess. Maybe as a DLC.

I don't think they'd do Hammerfell quite yet. And it doesn't seem to be the most popular of places. But, there is backstory there with them winning against the Thalmor. Likewise, a lot going on in Elsweyr and a lot more than Hammerfell.

Plus Elsweyr should be a lot more pretty than Hammerfell would be. That would get a lot more attention at E3 than Hammerfell would...cause...LOOK AT THE GRAPHICS.

And I doubt they want to do another "human" province. So, it is likely to be something else.

And on top of that...if they do Elsweyr...they can do a Summerset Isle dlc...can't do that in hammerfell.

There is other provinces of course, but those two are more likely with Elsweyr being much more likely.

However Elsweyr is pretty small on the map (they can always LOLCON it and make it big)...would make sense to add Valenwood on top of it.

Fallout 4 will be out first though.

[Putnam]

Thalmor's a political group, not a race. Hammerfell was also in Daggerfall already.

Note also that Morrowind took place only on the island in the northern part of Morrowind. They compress space a whole friggin lot. Tamriel is bigger than any empire in history; the island that the Imperial City on is around the size of France. Meanwhile, Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim are all ~40 square kilometers.

[Culise]

To be honest I find it mind-boggling that this is still a thing. Morrowind had the exact same problem and required the same workaround (i.e. the use of a fan-made tool to generate a merged leveled list), and that was more than ten years ago. Oblivion and Skyrim have made absolutely zero improvement in this area.

Pretty sure it's not still a thing. You can use scripting to add items to lists. Obviously scripting is harder than simply editing a list but the capability is there. Don't complain if the tools are there but most modders are simply too amateurish to make use of them. There's no way Bethesda can know if a certain modder intends to overwrite a whole list or just add stuff to it.

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/662256-best-way-to-add-items-to-merchants/

The capability was apparently also in Fallout 3/NV as well:

http://geck.bethsoft.com/index.php?title=AddItemToLeveledList

Accomplishing this via scripting tends to incur a performance cost, however, especially when taken to extremes like accessing and regenerating the loot lists for large numbers of containers repeatedly, once for each mod you load that alters them.  That's doubly-true when you can expect a significant proportion of those players who use mods to also use mods that rely on scripting to accomplish things that can only be done in that manner, on top of that.  It's understandable that item mod creators, given the choice, will decline to force users into that even if they do have that capability, rather than being "amateurish."

I would love an "append" command for the ESPs that would execute when the game loads the mods, though, rather than in-game with scripts.  It'd seem like it would do the job without nearly the same practical issues of in-game scripting.

[Teneb]

Speaking of the next game, I wonder where it will be central to. Elsweyr?

Well, so far they have done Morrowind (Dark Elves+Argonians), Cyrodiil (Imperials) and Skyrim (Nords)...my guess is actually either Elsweyr (Khajiits+Thalmor) or one of the Elven provinces. I am almost certain not Summerset Isles, that would move the story to quick...but never know I guess. Maybe as a DLC.

I don't think they'd do Hammerfell quite yet. And it doesn't seem to be the most popular of places. But, there is backstory there with them winning against the Thalmor. Likewise, a lot going on in Elsweyr and a lot more than Hammerfell.

Plus Elsweyr should be a lot more pretty than Hammerfell would be. That would get a lot more attention at E3 than Hammerfell would...cause...LOOK AT THE GRAPHICS.

And I doubt they want to do another "human" province. So, it is likely to be something else.

And on top of that...if they do Elsweyr...they can do a Summerset Isle dlc...can't do that in hammerfell.

There is other provinces of course, but those two are more likely with Elsweyr being much more likely.

However Elsweyr is pretty small on the map (they can always LOLCON it and make it big)...would make sense to add Valenwood on top of it.

Fallout 4 will be out first though.

Ok, so... There was as much of Black Marsh as there was of Elseweir in Morrowind. Which is to say, unless you consider argonians and khajiiti wandering about to be that, there wasn't.

And, as Putnam said, Bethesda compresses a lot. Vivec city in Morrowind only had the population of a small town, and yet it's supposed to be one of the biggest cities in the continent. Vvardenfell in-game is pretty damn small. In lore it's supposed to be about the size of greenland, if not bigger.

Now if the imperial isle is supposed to be about france-sized, you can imagine that Alinor would be much, much bigger. Too big for a DLC, that's for sure.

As for possible location candidates, I'm going to guess either Alinor or Valenwood. Probably Alinor though, since the Thalmor are getting quite a lot of focus in the story so far (and yeah, Thalmor's a political group, not a species).

[Vendayn]

Well, yeah Thalmor are High Elves...I mostly just consider them a separate group.

And I guess cause its a game, they can't really match the map size (which is obvious..).

Which brings me to...man do Elder Scrolls cities and villages suck so much. Worst cities in any game I've personally played...wait no...Rift (the crappy MMO) is worse...but hey! They are so tiny with very few NPCs. At least mods fix it (the mods I use make villages/cities a lot more realistic)...and I know exactly why...if cities were more realistic (maybe not 100%, but far more realistic than they are)...consoles would choke and die in them. Heck, my crappy ass I NEED AN UPGRADE!! PC chokes on them (but its the little engine that...sorta...barely...not really....could). Though that is partly cause the cities in my Skyrim are in the world and not a lame ass loading screen.

Imperial city was epic though...I loved that city. And mods made it bigger

[Putnam]

Altmer are High Elves. Thalmor are a political group.

Also, Skyrim's cities suck...